Forest Dragon 2: Mid-term results of the European partners

One of the main objectives of the Forest DRAGON 2 project is the evaluation of the Forest DRAGON 1 large area forest growing stock volume (GSV) maps generated for Northeast and Southeast China, based on ERS-1/2 tandem coherence data from the mid 1990s. A special cross-comparison design mainly based on freely available Earth Observation products has been developed in consequence of lack of extensive in situ measurements. A reasonable agreement above 70 % between the forest GSV maps and the EO products in terms of forest/ non-forest could be achieved for NE and SE China. The assessment of forest cover and structure changes in China from the mid 1990s into the current decade is addressed by a pilot study at the regions of Daxinganling and Xiaoxinganling. A one-year stack (2007) of Envisat ASAR GMM data has been processed at 1-km pixel size with the BIOMASAR algorithm to obtain continuous GSV. Accordingly, the ERS-1/2 tandem data has been reprocessed to 1 km to allow an intercomparison of the two products, which in turn allowed observing scaling effects on the forest GSV. Preliminary results show plausible detection of forest cover changes.